


Hell Ain't Half Full (take me with you)

by Anonymous



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, Malex, Post season finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-03-01 06:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18794593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Michael makes his first kill and spirals downward.Alex meets him at the bottom.





	Hell Ain't Half Full (take me with you)

**Author's Note:**

> This story is for AMANDA, with awe & appreciation.

Jesse Manes fired.

Alex dropped.

Michael screamed.

And suddenly Manes was flying backwards. He smashed into the wall. There was a sickening crack and he dropped, limp as a ragdoll. Head at an odd angle.

Then Alex groaned, sitting up slowly. In an instant Michael was on his knees at his side, cradling him against his chest. Gingerly he touched the side of Alex’s head; his fingers came away tacky with blood. “Graze,” Alex mumbled. “Bullet just grazed me.”

“So much blood,” Michael said hoarsely. His teeth were chattering, he realized, even though he wasn’t cold. “Alex, you’re bleeding…”

“Head wounds always do,” Alex said fuzzily. “’S just a...”

Michael looked down. His white t-shirt was smeared with Alex’s blood.

“’M fine,” Alex said, voice more robust now. His eyelids fluttered and he blinked several times before squinting up at Michael. “Really.”

Still carefully supporting Alex, Michael shrugged out of his flannel. He balled it up and pressed it against the gash on the side of Alex’s head. “Gotta get this cleaned up.” He was having trouble keeping his hands steady; in fact his whole body was convulsed with violent tremors. He felt wired, like he’d tossed back five shots of espresso and maybe a couple redbulls for good measure. The air around him seemed to hum with energy, an orange aura creeping into his peripheral vision. A tingling in his fingertips directed his focus downward; too late did he realize what was happening. His left hand, the one holding the flannel compress to Alex’s wound, was glowing. Glowing orange.

He wrenched his hand away.

“Michael?”

His breath was coming in short harsh pants. He closed his eyes briefly. When he reopened them, he looked down. Alex’s hair was stiff and spiky with dried blood, but when Michael tentatively parted the strands to peer at his scalp, there was no sign of the deep gash left by the bullet. Not even a scar. Just skin, smooth, unblemished and—

Sparkling. Iridescent.

At least Alex’s hair obscured the handprint.

“Shit,” he breathed. “Oh, shit, Alex, I’m sorry.”

“What?” Alex said, pushing off Michael’s chest to sit up on his own. “What’s wrong?”

“I… healed you,” he said, hardly believing it to be true. “It was an accident.”

“You healed me,” Alex repeated. “By accident.” He gave Michael a bemused look. “Why are you sorry?”

“I didn’t _ask_.” Horrified at himself. “I just…”

Alex ran his own fingers over the spot. “Like it never happened,” he said wonderingly. “Though it would have healed on its own, you know.”

Michael just sat there. Seismic vibrations surging through his body. What the fuck was wrong with him? He’d never felt so adrenalized in his life: hyper-alert, reeling with a super-sensory overload of sound and vision. Mind whirring so quickly that—

“Guerin, you can _heal_?” Alex demanded all of a sudden, scooting away from him on the ground. “Since when?”

“Since… now, I guess.” Michael wrapped his arms around his knees. Hoping that maybe if he made himself smaller, the energy inside him might get smaller, too. “I’ve never done it before.”

“Like Max healed Liz, and—”

“I didn’t bring you back from the dead,” he snapped.

“Have I got a handprint?”

“Yep.” He thought about the bottle of acetone sitting in the glove compartment of his truck; that would settle his stomach. Except he didn’t feel sick, he realized. He hadn’t even broken a sweat, despite tapping into a power he didn’t know he possessed. A power he hadn’t spent agonizing hours strengthening and disciplining, as he’d strengthened and disciplined his telekinesis as a teenager—

No, this was horribly wrong. He should be on all fours, puking his guts out—… Maybe he was having a delayed reaction, still coming down from the terror of seeing Alex fall.

He felt galvanized. Like his nervous system had been replaced by electric current.

Alex was staring at him, mouth open slightly.

“It’s hidden under your hair,” Michael told him. “The handprint. Can’t see it.”

Alex shook his head. “What the hell…” he said softly, but not like he was angry with Michael. More… intrigued. He reached over and patted Michael’s knee.

Michael flinched.

“You’re running hotter than usual,” Alex observed. He touched the side of his head again. “Where’s my dad?” he asked.

  
*

  
They picked the shittiest motel they could find.

They were a couple hours west of Roswell; they’d driven out to explore a defunct army facility deep in the Lincoln Forest. Now Alex took charge: they would regroup before they went home, he decided, so they stopped at a strip of wayside motor inns just outside the Mescalero Reservation. The one Alex chose for them had a sign proclaiming ‘Yes, We Have Waterbeds!’ But the sign was broken, propped in the alleyway to the side of the building with a pile of discarded coffee cups, cigarette butts and dead leaves.

“Stay here,” Alex ordered, getting out of the passenger seat. “We don’t want anyone looking at you.” Michael was covered in Alex’s blood. And he was still crackling with energy and nerves, despite the mental effort it had taken to dig a six-foot grave for Jesse Manes and tip the pile of dirt over the body. He watched as Alex ducked inside the office, paid cash for a room, and collected the key from the defeated-looking Native guy behind the counter.

Alex had got them a room around the back, away from the road. Michael parked the truck in front of the door and jumped down lightly; gravity didn’t seem to be affecting him as much as usual. Alex hustled him inside. His face was calm, impassive, and the hand he rested on Michael’s back was steady. Michael tried to emulate him; he knew his body language was all wrong, cat-like and springy when he ought to be hunched, shuffling, subdued. He didn’t know what his face was doing. His lips and nostrils felt numb. He compressed his lips and bit the inside of his cheek. His mouth began to fill, but he couldn’t taste the blood.

Alex made him shower first because of all the gore. Michael tore off his clothes and bundled them into a plastic trash bag. “Burn it,” he told Alex.

“But it’s my blood, not his,” Alex protested. “We can wash—”

“Just do it,” Michael said, and closed the bathroom door. He studied his face in the mirror over the sink. His eyes were bright, glittering as if with fever, but otherwise showed no evidence of the transformation he’d undergone. His hair was a tangled riot of curls and he’d accumulated several days’ worth of stubble, but he looked _fine_. He stepped back so he could inspect his torso. Nothing extra-ordinary about it; he hadn’t turned into Iron Man. If anything, he’d lost weight over the long few months since Noah, since the prison. Since Max and Rosa. Since he and Alex hadn’t collapsed in love the way they were supposed to, the way the cosmos wanted them to, because they were both too stubborn, too stupid, too exhausted, too hurt.

The water wasn’t very hot to start with and it got cold fast. There was hardly any pressure in the groaning old pipes, either, but it did the job, washing the blood down the rusty drain. Scrubbing his skin with cheap hotel soap, rubbing himself raw, Michael imagined he was sending all the surplus energy down the drain too. Afterwards he just stood under the weak spray, freezing, not knowing what else to do, not knowing if he had managed to get clean.

He was shaking again by the time Alex pounded on the door.

“Hey Guerin, are you okay in there?” His voice brought Michael back.

“Yeah.” He killed the water, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his hips. “You should wait,” he told Alex as he stepped back into the room. “Water’s cold.”

“No.” Alex had already stripped down to his boxers and he dropped them right in front of him, forgetting they were supposed to be “just friends,” or just not caring. “Something about being in a cheap motel room with you, Guerin, makes me need a cold shower,” he threw over his shoulder as he went into the bathroom.

It wasn’t funny, wasn’t meant to be, but Michael shook his head at the incongruity of their role reversal. Usually _he_ was the one with the reflexive banter, his brain flipping to autopilot whenever he needed to deflect, divert, defuse. With Alex in the other room, he collapsed on his side on the bed and gave over to the energy—okay, fine, _power_ —coursing through his system. He shook and shivered, vibrated and blazed with his newfound strength, letting it wrack his body.

He saw orange.

And it was fucking seismic.

Noah hadn’t been lying.

Michael felt like a god.

A god among humans, a god among aliens.

Noah knew. Max and Isobel knew, they had both felt it.

Not him, though. He had never lost control, never lost his mind. Never killed anyone, by accident or design.

Until now.

He could _say_ it was an accident, that he hadn’t meant to throw Master Sergeant Manes so hard his neck snapped with the impact.

But that would be a lie.

Alex thought he might have located another Project Shepherd facility, so they’d made the sixty mile trek out to the National Forest, a fragile truce hovering between them. Even after Michael’s relationship with Maria had imploded, as he and everyone else had known it would, he and Alex were still awkward, uneasy around each other. Neither entirely sure what being “friends” looked like, after everything they’d been through. Like some old poet said somewhere, _after such knowledge, what forgiveness_? But they were trying. When Alex turned up in front of his airstream that morning, offering another road trip, Michael was wary. _What’s the catch_? Waiting for Kyle to roll up, too. But no Kyle this time. Just the two of them. And so they found the spot, secreted away on reservation land. But unlike Caulfield, this facility was properly condemned. Empty rooms lined with dust, not a stray file left behind. No guards and no prisoners, human or alien. Abandoned by the government, but harboring one last fugitive—a fugitive who had shaken off his coma and escaped from Roswell General a few weeks back, to the alarm of one Doctor Kyle Valenti and the resignation of one Captain Alexander Manes. _He’ll run right back to Niger, if he knows what’s good for him_. But he hadn’t, he didn’t. Blundering down the hallways of the facility, bad-tempered and sniping at each other, Michael and Alex had turned a corner and collided with Master Sergeant Jesse Manes. Master Sergeant Jesse Manes, who had squeezed the trigger and shot his youngest son. All in a split second. And Michael had thought Alex was dead.

The blood roared in his ears.

An eye for an eye. But Jesse Manes didn’t have enough eyes to pay for all he’d taken from Michael Guerin.

He had robbed Michael of his first family, his mother. Locked them away and tortured them for decades, sent them up in flames moments after Michael had found them. Found _her._ And now Alex. The family he had chosen, the family he was slowly finding his way back to, the family— _person_ —he loved more than anyone, anything, in the universe.

So Michael had screamed.

And his scream had ripped an Alex-shaped hole in the universe, and he’d flung Master Sergeant Manes into that void with all his psychic strength, and—

Well.

He sent Master Sergeant Manes straight to hell, boy.

He was a killer.

And now he knew.

_Power._

Pure, unadulterated.

Chaos was power. He reeled with it.

A god.

_The_ god.

Invincible.

Deciding who lived, and who died.

No wonder Max had gone back to the cave, to Rosa—

_After such knowledge…_

He wasn’t running. He wasn’t scared.

… _what forgiveness?_

He was fucking terrified.

  
*

  
Alex looked better when he came out of the bathroom, thin motel towel wrapped around his waist. But Michael—now he was shaking harder than ever, shaking so badly the bed was shaking with him.

_Why was this happening to him?_

_Max_ had called down the lightning like he was fucking Zeus and flash-fried Noah and healed Michael’s hand (sort of) without turning into a natural disaster; why couldn’t _Michael_ cope with this tsunami of power-adrenaline-divinity? The physical need to unleash his chaos—to break, to kill, to resurrect a whole graveyard of decaying zombies just because he _could_ —rattled through his body. He gritted his teeth and held it back. But the chaos just kept coming, wave after wave, tremor after tremor. An earthquake.

Alex froze.

Michael couldn’t see him, though, not really; Alex might as well not have been there at all. There wasn’t much going on in Michael’s head, while his body was busy duking it out with his powers, just a white noise murmur of _god monster murderer_ ; mostly he was thinking that it was odd to be shaking like this, shaking with power and not being able to stop or even think about stopping. Maybe he’d never stop, because how could he unleash his powers ever again if this was the result, if this was what he became, so he’d have to keep shaking, rattling, rolling, until maybe his heart stopped.

He didn’t know what else to do.

But Alex did.

When saying his name— _Michael, Michael_ —had no effect, and jostling his shoulder did no better, Alex took hold of him with both hands.

“Michael!”

Alex pushed him over onto his back, he pried his hands away from his face and took both of his wrists in one hand, pinning them above his head. A tendon or something in his shoulder popped and the pain actually felt good, got his attention. Alex used his other hand to unlock his knees from his chest. Forced him to lie flat, then held him down with his knees, his legs, one flesh and blood and the other cool titanium.

His towel was gone and he registered that he was naked and so was Alex, but he didn’t care, why should he care. They were in too much trouble, nothing mattered except that he’d killed Alex’s father and now he was a great and terrible god, and there was no coming back from this. How was it Alex didn’t seem to know. Alex’s eyes were dark with fear: fear _for_ him or _of_ him? Fear _for_ him, Michael could tell the difference, but that was all wrong, why was Alex looking at him like this, like he didn’t hate him, like he didn’t realize Michael was half a sneeze from blasting them to kingdom come?

He felt the tectonic shift of his power again, pushing insistently against his skin, determined to break out. But he wouldn’t give it an outlet. No. He’d hold it in, contain it. Because he’d never hurt Alex, he’d fucking die first, he’d let this ill-gotten power tear him apart along his fault-lines—

He could let go, he _had_ to go. Let himself be consumed by the energy and chaos. But Alex needed to get the fuck off him first, because Michael wasn’t taking Alex with him.

But Alex wouldn’t. Get the fuck off him.

Alex raised his hand and Michael wondered for a second if he meant to slap him, like in the movies when somebody was having a fit, and he smirked up at Alex challengingly, inviting it. _Go on. Hit me._ But Alex didn’t, he just took Michael’s face in his hand. Mouth only about an inch from his, his thumb, his fingers, pressing on his jaw.

“I’m glad he’s dead.” Alex leaned his forehead against his, breathing into his face, and Michael felt a tremor run through his chest; Alex was shaking too. “D’you hear me, Michael? I’m _glad._ He may have been my father, but he hasn’t been my family for a long time. That’s you. You’re my family.”

The words from the prison. When Michael’s heart had torn between his mom and Alex and he couldn’t choose, how could he possibly choose, so she chose for him.

“I should have been the one to do it,” said Alex. “He was my war, my responsibility. You don’t deserve this.”

Michael disagreed, but he couldn’t get the words out; maybe he’d developed lockjaw.

“I know what you’re doing right now,” Alex told him.

“Yeah?” he grunted through his teeth.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “You don’t want it. The, the… —supercharge, or whatever you get from killing. Because you’re nothing like Noah. Or Max. _Nothing_ , Michael. You’re not a killer. You’re fighting it, with everything you’ve got.”

“How—”

“Your handprint.” Alex released his hold on Michael’s wrists, took his hand and pressed it against the side of his head where the bullet had gouged him. “From when you healed me. I can feel—a trace of you. What you’re feeling.”

“Oh,” Michael said. The frenzy within him receded a little. Cautiously, he ran his fingers through Alex’s hair, but there were no electric zaps of energy, just the silky wet strands beneath his fingertips. He felt his muscles beginning to unclench one by one, his body softening, sinking. Alex wasn’t really holding him down anymore, just leaning his weight on top of him, pressing him into the bed. He was also hard, more or less, against Michael’s leg. For the first time since they’d landed here he took in Alex’s body, his skin, how he was golden-brown all over. This was the first time in months that Alex had touched his skin.

“You’re getting up,” Alex was telling him and Michael felt him readjust his weight, still on him but moving to the side. “I found the spare clothes in the truck. We’ll pull ourselves together, then we’ll leave, we’ll grab some food, and head back to Roswell. As far as anyone is concerned, this trip was a dead end.” Alex rattled off the instructions, military-style, seemingly ignoring everything else. His face was even closer to Michael’s now, he was leaning on his elbows, body against his still. Despite the cold water in the shower Alex was warm.

“Yeah,” Michael heard himself say, and felt like sure, okay, he could do that, he could go through the motions without blowing anything up.

Alex didn’t move though, he just lay there, looking steadily into his eyes through the wet spirals of Michael’s hair, plastered across his face, as if he was trying to see what was inside of him.

_Fuck, Alex_ , Michael told him silently, _you already know. You’ve seen it all now._ Alex’s eyes were like dark water, pools he could slide into and stay under forever and not drown. Michael shifted a little under him to rub his hip against his cock and that broke the spell. Alex brushed his hair aside, moving in slow motion. Michael didn’t even remember sliding his arms around his back, but there they were.

“We’re good,” Alex said, barely audible.

Michael knew Alex wouldn’t do it so he reached up, pulled him down the short distance to meet his mouth, kissed him. Ran his tongue over the sharp edge of his teeth. For a moment Alex responded, then he pulled away.

“You don’t want to,” he said.

“What?” There was nothing Michael wanted more in the universe.

“You didn’t want to,” Alex said, eyes downcast for a moment, then flicking back up to meet his. “Before.”

Michael smothered the quick flash of anger before it could launch another earthquake. Alex wanted him, he _knew_ Alex wanted him and he could _feel_ Alex wanting him, there, against his hip. He rolled his eyes in frustration because how was he supposed to come up with reasons for things now, when there was no reason left for anything.

Was Alex really going to make him try to explain himself?

Did Michael actually have to spell it out for him, that until right fucking now he had dreamt of something better for Alex Manes, something better for _them_ , in this rotten bitch of a life? That what he wanted for Alex was not some heartbroken drunk fuck in the airstream with the name _Maria_ hanging between them, but a new beginning— one that didn’t forget the sorrows but didn’t drown in them, either.

But now… There was nothing else left, for either of them. No happy alternative.

Because they were _so. incredibly. fucked._

Because Michael had killed Jesse Manes and together they’d dumped the body and buried the evidence. So what if Manes deserved it, had it coming? The dead man would still drag Michael— _god, monster, murderer_ —down to hell with him. And now Alex, fucking Alex, was the one who wouldn’t look away. Determined to go down, too. So, as far as Michael was concerned, Alex might as well screw his ex-whatever in a shitty motel room one last time because things were only gonna get worse from here.

They would be on the run for the rest of their lives, one way or another.

Fugitives.

Accomplices.

Murderers.

The world was a bad place. A terrible place to live. It was obvious to Michael; why wasn’t it obvious to Alex?

“You don’t know what I wanted,” he said, finally. He lifted his hand—steady, he noticed—and stroked Alex’s cheek with the back of his fingers. Alex bowed his head, breathed.

A moment later Alex was kissing him like a teenager, without finesse, like he was tasting something he thought he’d never get, like he was afraid it would be yanked away from him at any second. The thirst and the ache Michael felt in him matched his own. He slid his leg between Alex’s; Alex clamped down on it, grinding against him. Michael pushed back, flexed his thigh muscle, and thought it could almost be enough, just like this.

Almost.

Breaking the kiss, he rolled over onto his front and buried his face in the pillow. His momentum carried Alex with him; he felt Alex’s body cover his like a warm blanket.

“Michael?”

“Do it,” he said thickly. A mouthful of pillow.

There was a long pause. “You sure?” Alex said tentatively, and Michael felt his heart slamming against his ribcage.

“Yeah.” He spread his legs further apart and reached behind him, blindly grasping for Alex’s hand. He took Alex’s fingers, dipped them down.

“Hold on, hold on.” Alex sounded flustered. “Let me get…” He moved away, and Michael could hear him rustling around in their bags. Then the pop of a lid, and the mattress dipped under his weight as he rejoined him on the bed.

“Jojoba,” Alex said apologetically. “Don’t worry, it’s gentle. I use it on my…”

Michael turned his head to the side. The intensity of what he was feeling frightened him a little. Desperation. Desire. Despair. “We’re good,” he said, repeating Alex’s words back to him.

  
*

  
“You’re fighting me,” Alex told him a few minutes later.

Michael growled into the pillow. Alex’s fingers were sending flashes of lightning through his body and he was tense as a coiled spring. “Sorry.” He exhaled. Cast about for a way to distract himself; invariably, he started babbling. “It’s just that I’ve always been the one who makes the other person feel good. In the active sense. It’s not a macho thing,” he added hastily. “I never cared about the mechanics, I just thought I’d be… less likely to catch feelings that way. Fucking joke, right? ’Cause you were the exception, you were always the exception…” He shuddered on another exhale as Alex stretched his fingers apart. “Still, though, all those years you were away… I started thinking of feelings as like. Vestigial annoyances. For me to master and— _oh, fuck_ —o-overcome. I—I guess I was never really held or kissed or whatever as a kid, after I was separated from my mom, so it was easy to— _Jesus Christ, Alex_ —turn intimacy into something… barbaric. And it still feels kinda alien—no pun intended—to like… lay back and let you—… Sometimes I… I still think— _fuck_ —that love is the worst thing that ever happened to me. This closeness… I’m a little outta my depth here.”

He was suddenly vibrating with the need to reach out and touch Alex, to taste him, in the old primal way. To flip them over and bury himself—tongue, fingers, cock—inside him. The force of wanting took his breath away. He bit the pillow and held himself in check; sheer force of will. The agony of inaction was sort of delicious, in its own way. And something _had_ changed, in the midst of his wandering soliloquy, because now he was pushing back against Alex’s hand, and it had gone from too much to not enough. “C’mon, Alex, just do it,” he barked. “Fucking put it in me already.”

  
*

  
“I could do way better than this, Guerin,” Alex panted, pinning one of Michael’s hands over his head, clutching at his fingers, as he tried a couple experimental strokes and buried his face in Michael’s shoulder.

“Yeah, me too… whatever,” Michael mumbled. “Safer this way.” Even in happier days he lost control sometimes, because sex with Alex was epic and the euphoria would spill out of him, making the bed levitate and objects fly through the air. And now, with all the murderous foreign power humming through his veins, he was afraid to touch Alex while they were fucking; who knew what he was capable of? But he didn’t have much leverage, lying on his front, and Alex was being tentative, too gentle, alternating between trying to kiss him and rearing back to see what he was doing. Michael wanted to tell Alex he didn’t need to take it easy, he didn’t need to multi-task, he could fucking go to town, honestly. So he reached back and slid his fingers into Alex’s hair, over the handprint he’d left a few hours ago. _Not gonna break. C’mon Alex._

Alex inhaled sharply, hips going still. “Oh my god,” he breathed. “Michael, was that you?”

Michael nodded into the pillow.

“You want me to…?” Alex sounded hesitant.

“Shut off the noise in my head, yeah.”

Alex didn’t say anything back, just picked up the pace. Serious and purposeful, holding onto him tightly. Michael helped as best he could, rocking his hips, rutting into the mattress for the drag of friction against his cock. His eyes were watering from the stretch and burn, from the sense of being utterly possessed by Alex. Part of him thinking he could never ever do this again because he was flayed open and burning up; another part wondering why he had waited so long to try it.

Alex had gone silent, except for his ragged breathing, so after a time Michael asked him how it was.

“So fucking good, Guerin,” he said, and stopped trying to watch, burying his face in Michael’s hair. “So good… so good…” He kept on saying it, over and over again, like a mantra, _so good, so good, so good_ … until eventually it wasn’t words anymore, just sounds, his, Michael’s, on and on and on.

And Alex was right, it _was_ good, so fucking good; it was perfect. Alex might as well have been fucking him everywhere, all the way up through his body and right into his brain, forcing out everything else, silencing the noise. This was _Alex_. Nothing but Alex, all Alex; there was nobody else left in the universe. Alex was Michael’s and Michael was Alex’s and they both knew it. Then Alex was coming; Michael heard his name on Alex’s lips, along with God’s, and Jesus’s, and a whole host of profanity, too, but he was lost in it, coming too, coming forever, falling and falling. For once, he barely made a sound.

  
*

  
Michael collapsed back on the bed as Alex unfastened his prosthetic and set it on the floor with a sigh of relief. “Better?” he asked redundantly, and Alex smiled, nodded.

Gravity still wasn’t working quite right on him. He bounced a couple times experimentally, and the bed pitched and rolled under him. His heart sank a little. The laws of physics had never quite applied to him, at least not when it came to entropy and mind over matter, but gravity was a constant; even exponentially amplified by _murder_ , surely his powers couldn’t—…

The force of attraction between two bodies, Michael and the bed, equaled mass(Michael) times mass(bed), divided by the squared distance between the center of Michael and the center of the bed, all multiplied by the gravitational constant—

“ _Yes, We Have Water Beds_!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Oh, thank fuck.”

Alex looked at him like he’d lost his mind.

“I thought the surge was fucking with my gravity,” he said. “But then I remembered the sign out front. Water beds. That’s why it feels funny.”

“Right,” Alex said, a little doubtfully, but he lay back down beside him. “Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“We should still eat,” Alex said, and Michael shrugged acquiescence. Alex was in charge of this mission; he was just obeying orders.

Until Alex said: “We need to go home soon.”

_Home?_

There was no going back, Michael thought. He was afraid, and fear acted as a stimulant. He rolled on top of Alex, and Alex opened his legs to receive him; maybe he didn’t want to go home either. Michael latched onto his neck like a drunken vampire. Marking him. Unable to stop his fingers from carding through his hair, finding the handprint again. He had imprinted himself all over Alex. It gave him a rush of savage pride as he raised his head to catch Alex’s eyes with his. Trapping him with a dark, primitive stare, what Alex used to call his “caveman face,” which translated roughly as _I am going to drag you into my cave and fuck you._

But when he closed his eyes and kissed him, he felt the savagery ebb away. He slipped his tongue into Alex’s mouth and set about kissing him senseless, the craving for a good hard fuck replaced by a piercing tenderness that was its own kind of dangerous.

Time stopped while he kissed him; you didn’t have to be a scientist to know everything began and ended in eternity.

Reluctantly he pulled back when Alex’s mouth began to slacken under his, fingers loosening their tight grip on his curls. Alex was falling asleep, Michael thought, carefully maneuvering his weight off him. He curled on his side to face him and Alex did the same. A pair of inverted commas. Michael knew he wouldn’t sleep, perhaps he wouldn’t sleep for days, but he was grateful for the bit of stillness afforded by sex and proximity and everything else that had passed between them.

But Alex wasn’t asleep. He was fidgeting, picking at his cuticles, not quite looking at Michael. Gearing up to say something, a line forming between his brows. “So is this, like, permanent now?” he blurted, and then seemed abashed, cheeks flooding with color.

“You and me?” Michael said. Alex’s eyes were sliding over him, all over his body, like they couldn’t gain enough traction anywhere. “Yeah, I guess.”

“You don’t sound too happy about it.”

“Nah, it’s just…”

“ _What_ , Michael? What?” Alex’s voice was breaking.

“I wish it was different,” he said. His eyes stung. “I thought—… I was gonna, like… court you, Alex, fuckin’ _woo_ you back. When things got better. When _I_ got better and it didn’t hurt so much to look at you. Do us right this time.”

“Michael—”

“This wasn’t how I wanted us to get back together.” He sounded like he’d swallowed sandpaper. “Because I killed somebody— _your dad—_ and you helped me cover it up and suddenly we’ve got _another_ terrible secret just when I thought we were done with secrets, all of us. But here we are, thrown back together, and we’ll never know the fucking difference between love and complicity.”

He scrunched his face up, but a couple tears squeezed their way out anyway.

“Bullshit,” Alex said crisply.

“Huh?” He blinked and a tear ran down his nose.

Alex swept it away with his thumb. “Jesus, Guerin,” he said, and he actually sounded fond, or maybe exasperated; Michael had never been able to tell the difference. “It was self-defense. There’s no terrible secret. Give me three minutes on the computer, and I'll make it all disappear, make _him_  disappear. And _complicity_? We’ve been complicit since we were seventeen, Michael.”

He couldn’t argue that. It had always been them against the world, whether they knew it or not. Black eyes, bruised ribs, the flash of recognition across stunted childhoods and starved adolescence; _we’re too old, we’re not old at all._

“Love is a kind of complicity, I guess,” he conceded.

Alex leaned in and kissed him. Michael hadn’t seen him like this in ages. So goddamn light. Like he was just… letting himself be happy. Michael wondered if he could, too.

But:

“I still killed somebody,” he heard himself saying. “Can’t change the facts.”

Alex reached over and picked up his phone. “C’mere.”

“Why?” Michael said, suspicious.

“Just come here.”

He sat up and moved closer to Alex so they could peer at the screen together. Alex had the camera app open, but he’d reversed it so they were staring at their own reflected image.

“We gonna take a naked selfie, Manes?” He leered, tilting the camera downward, but Alex leveled it back to their faces.

“Just look.” Alex rested his chin on Michael’s shoulder. “What do you see?”

Michael opened his mouth to say something flippant, but the words dried up on his tongue. He was almost surprised to recognize himself. He was pale under his tan and his hair was in disarray, damp curls ricocheting off in every direction. His eyes glittered, bloodshot with salt and tears, but the feverish sheen had dimmed. It was still his face. It was the face of a killer. But he had seen the face of evil, looked into its eyes. This was not it. _He_ was not it. He knew because he wasn’t alone in the mirror this time, Alex was beside him.

He pressed the button to take the picture.

**Author's Note:**

> Song credz to PJ Harvey.
> 
> Previously: SATELLITE'S GONE, WHAT YOU BREAK IS WHAT YOU GET, BOYS KEEP SWINGING, HALLO SPACEBOY. 
> 
> <3


End file.
